Models

Category archives for Models

We’ve talked aplenty about how much we still need to understand about influenza. Not just its basic biology but its dynamics. How does it spread over space and time and how existing infection rates affect future infection rates and how each are related to the number of susceptibles in the population. It’s even more than…

Making predictions about something as unpredictable as flu is foolhardy. I rarely (if ever) do it, but I’m going to do it now. I am predicting a bad and early H1N1 swine flu season in the northern hemisphere next fall and winter. The reasons for this departure from our usual custom is a paper in…

It is clear that if you want to get a so-so paper published in a top tier journal, the best way to do it is to write about a breaking medical news event and get there first. We saw this with avian influenza and SARS and now it’s being repeated with swine flu. The Scientist…

Trying to figure out where the incipient swine flu pandemic is heading and how fast it is heading there is shooting at a moving target, and this one is moving pretty fast. The best we can do at this point is use whatever information we have to make some educated guesses about different scenarios along…

New Scientist reporter Mark Buchanan has a fascinating article this week on “the curse of work.” The title might be the least satisfactory thing about this examination of a new mathematical article that attempts to explain the inexplicable: